1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and a method for transferring formed pieces, and specifically to the apparatus and the method for transferring formed soft pieces, for example intraoral soluble tablets which are easily crumbled or dissolved within an oral cavity.
2. Description of the Related Art
In manufacturing medicinal tablets, when the tablets ejected from a production apparatus such as a tableting machine are received in a container, the tablets have been transported by methods such as a gravity method where they naturally drop from the tableting machine into the container, a bucket conveyer method where they are moved into buckets for transport to the container, an air transportation method using clean air, and a conveyer belt method.
Now, among known medicinal tablets is a so-called intraoral soluble tablet which is easily dissolved or crumbled within an oral cavity for ease of swallowing. The intraoral soluble tablets are so fragile as to suffer cracking, chipping, splitting, or cutting even by a vertical drop of only about 20 cm. Therefore, there has been a problem that such tablets obtained are liable to crack or chip by means of the above-mentioned conventional methods of receiving the tablets in the container.
Consequently, for the transfer of tablets, proposed is an apparatus by which cracking or chipping is not liable to occur, the apparatus employing a spiral chute to make the dropping distance of the tablets shorter. See, for example, JP 10-203617 (See especially Page 4, FIG. 1).
However, since the spiral chute used is complicated in shape in JP 10-203617, there have been problems in that machining takes so much time as to raise machining costs and cleaning is also laborious.